When Google Voice confirmed up method again in 2009, I used to be one of many first to enroll. Ditto for Google Fi. However final month I ditched each of them on the similar time, turning my again on an astonishing fifteen years of built-in providers. Why? As a result of Google turned its again on me, and I used to be uninterested in coping with its hypocrisy.
A little bit context, for those who’re not conscious. Google Voice is the corporate’s number-forwarding service, and it was extraordinarily cool when it first debuted. You bought your personal new telephone quantity, which Google operated as a free VOIP service, and you might use it with any present phone or quantity. It may well mainly substitute your commonplace cell or landline quantity, in addition to allow you to entry textual content messages through a devoted app in your telephone or the net. For somebody who critiques telephones, and doesn’t wish to consistently swap SIM playing cards, it’s superior.
Google Fi is Google’s cell digital community operator, a branded provider service that competes (in smaller methods) with corporations like AT&T and Verizon. It helps you to purchase your cell service from the identical place you purchase Pixel telephones, kind of, and presents fairly good offers for those who’re okay with leaning on T-Cellular’s smaller community as a spine. It’s particularly good for those who occur to be a Pixel Watch proprietor (and I’m). I’ll add that each Google Voice and Google Fi are solely obtainable to customers in the US, although the latter has good worldwide roaming choices.
I appreciated each Voice and Fi for a very long time, particularly as somebody who reviewed telephones professionally. Voice particularly let me textual content and name from a laptop computer or desktop PC lengthy earlier than extra widespread choices grew to become obtainable. Fi, like T-Cellular, was typically nice and extra inexpensive as long as I used to be throughout the metropolis limits. So why did I make a pointy, clear break with Google’s administration of my cell connections?
It wasn’t due to Google’s privateness points, although it definitely has these in abundance. It’s not as a result of I believe my new cell supplier, Verizon, is in some way higher or much less evil. It isn’t. Nope, I used to be sick of Google ignoring its Voice service, particularly within the mild of a extremely public marketing campaign in opposition to Apple. Between that and a few dramatic interoperability points, I hit the highway for much less aggravating pastures.
Google pesters Apple to assist RCS
Keep in mind when Google was pestering Apple so as to add RCS capabilities to the iPhone? I positive do. Google publically nagged Apple to undertake the trendy texting commonplace, and eventually deliver extra fluid communication between iMessage and different platforms (primarily SMS on Android), for over a calendar yr. It even made a bit of celebratory commercial when the iPhone started to play good, enabling higher assist for issues like emoji reactions, group textual content options, and high-quality picture and video sharing.
So given Google’s extraordinarily public assist of cross-platform RCS, why the ever-loving heck doesn’t Google Voice assist RCS?
Yup, although Google Voice has been round for fifteen years, lengthy predating Google’s united Messages texting app for Android, Voice nonetheless doesn’t assist RCS messaging. Should you use Voice on Android (or wherever else, together with the iPhone!), you’re caught with horrible pictures and the “Ted like this message” response that Google complained about as little as three months in the past. Not solely does this occur between Voice customers and iPhone customers, it even occurs for those who’re utilizing Voice and chatting with different Android customers.
Google Voice, as an SMS platform, is a freakin’ dinosaur.
I absolutely don’t have to elucidate why Google missing RCS assist on certainly one of its personal telephone merchandise is a foul look. And I’m not the one one to make this criticism. Each common customers and my tech journalist fellows have identified this inconsistency for years. Whereas Google Voice is limping together with minimal updates, apparently avoiding the notorious Google Graveyard because of some good company integrations, it positively looks like its customers have been deserted.
Google tried — and failed — to make a messaging walled backyard
However even that isn’t what actually rankles me. It’s Google’s holier-than-thou perspective. Google has pushed Apple to undertake RCS, implying that it’s doing so on behalf of the roughly half of the market that’s utilizing Android. And whereas Android customers definitely need to have the ability to chat with iPhone customers extra fluidly, that’s not the driving issue behind Google’s marketing campaign.
The reality is that iMessage is an actual draw to the iPhone, particularly for youthful customers who’ve made the “Android inexperienced textual content” a scarlet letter. And that’s a delicate risk to Android. I believe that Google fears iMessage as a product excess of it altruistically needs to enhance messaging throughout the board.
Petter Ahrnstedt
Need extra proof? Google would completely kill to be in Apple’s place with iMessage. As a result of it has tried to get there, a number of occasions, with a number of chat providers. Google Discuss. Google Voice. Google Wave, with its personal built-in chat service a la Fb. Google Buzz. Google+, once more with a chat part. Google Hangouts. Google Allo. Google Chat (which is what individuals referred to as Discuss for the longest time). And that was the record as of three years in the past, not together with “Messages” as an app-slash-platform on Android, Chrome, and the net.
Google has tried to create a communications backyard, with various levels of partitions, throughout three many years. And it has failed. So it’s onerous to see the push in opposition to Apple’s iMessage as something greater than bitter grapes. Don’t get me unsuitable, Google goading Apple into no less than some interoperability with RCS is certainly a win for customers and customers. However Google solely did it after it spent years and years exhausting each doable possibility to increase its monopolistic practices into this sphere.
Google Voice and Google Fi couldn’t work collectively
So yeah, seeing Google fake to be the individuals’s champion for open messaging after years of Voice customers begging for RCS was galling. As my sister welcomed her first baby and I abruptly began to care about getting higher-quality pictures and movies, I began on the lookout for a method out. (For the file, my sister can also be an Android and Pixel consumer of over a decade — see why that is so irritating for us, Google?)
So a few years in the past, whereas nonetheless utilizing Google Voice and Google Fi, I attempted to port my Voice quantity to Fi. In principle, although Google Voice is a VOIP service, it ought to have been identical to porting a quantity from any provider to a different. Google Fi was app-agnostic, and will have supported RCS. I’d have to change apps from Voice to Messages, however it could lastly work.
It didn’t. The porting course of, that’s. There’s a reasonably primary instrument on-line to port your quantity into Google Fi, however for no matter cause, it didn’t settle for my Voice quantity. “Not eligible for switch.” I wasn’t completely shocked by this, because the VOIP nature of the Google Voice quantity generally causes complications — some banks and providers like Uber don’t prefer it, and for that cause I’ve had to make use of my backup (the quantity connected to my bodily SIM card) every so often. Others have skilled the identical challenge making an attempt to maneuver a quantity from Voice to Fi.
Michael Crider/Foundry
So I put in a assist ticket with Google Fi, the incarnation of Google that I had been paying $60 a month to for years, and waited. And waited. And waited. For a yr. And nothing occurred. And nothing occurred for an additional yr.
Quick ahead to December, 2024. I’m staring down the barrel of a two-week vacation journey to rural Texas, during which many pictures and movies will probably be shared. I attempt to port my Google Voice quantity over to Google Fi once more. It gained’t work. The automated system doesn’t say how or why quantity porting is damaged, simply that it isn’t obtainable for that quantity, an expertise that’s apparently frequent sufficient that it has a warning on the assist web page: “Take into account that some Google Voice numbers can’t be transferred to Google Fi.”
Why? How? Is there any hope for these affected? No thought. I grit my enamel and put together to truly contact a human working for Google.
I begin with Google Fi, since once more, they’re those I’m paying. I ask if there’s any cause that Google Voice numbers shouldn’t have the ability to be ported. They are saying no. I strive once more, and present the proof that it doesn’t work. They allegedly get somebody from Google Voice within the dialog (allegedly, as a result of that is all taking place in a text-based interface, and it may very well be the identical particular person for all I do know). The Google Voice particular person tries to port. It doesn’t work.
The telephone quantity that I’ve been utilizing for fifteen years is, by all appearances, trapped on Voice, a zombie platform that doesn’t assist the RCS options Google itself has been championing in public. Out of frustration (and sure, I admit, no small quantity of Karen-style entitlement), I ask the Voice customer support particular person when Google Voice will add RCS assist, even linking them to the movies of that exact same public Google marketing campaign.
The service particular person apologizes, however they haven’t any data on any plans so as to add RCS assist to Google Voice. So in abstract, a Google texting service refuses to implement the texting requirements that Google calls for Apple implement, and likewise can’t full a really primary telephone service factor into one other Google service.
Google doesn’t deserve your loyalty
At this level I let my fingers do the strolling over to Verizon Wi-fi’s web site, which has a instrument that permits you to take a look at whether or not or not you possibly can import your quantity to the provider. You don’t have to enroll in an account. In keeping with this web site, it may well settle for my Google Voice quantity, VOIP warts and all, and get me arrange with an eSIM in only a few minutes.
Pictured: not me, not my telephone, not my laptop. However the actual emotion I felt making an attempt to make use of a Google product with one other Google product.
Anna Tarazevich/Pexels
So I did it. I’m on Verizon now, and never particularly joyful about it — in some way Verizon managed to get me signed up for the service instantly with out really having a Verizon account, and I needed to drive to a retail retailer to pay my first invoice.
However I stored the telephone quantity I’ve been utilizing for 15 years, now unshackled from any Google service, and I’m getting high-res pictures and movies from my sister and brother-in-law. And no less than Verizon by no means pretended to be a champion of open requirements. Why may Verizon port the quantity in with none issues, when Google couldn’t do it from certainly one of its personal providers to a different? I do not know. I actually begged Google to inform me throughout a number of years, and it couldn’t.
I totally admit that this text is a little bit of therapeutic whining on my half. However I do know there are different Voice and Fi customers who’ve the identical complaints. To you I say: Strive getting off of Google. No firm deserves your loyalty, and thru hypocrisy and apathy, Google deserves it even much less.
